19TH CENTURY: THE FIREBURN LABOR RIOT, UNITED STATES VIRGIN ISLANDS (1878)

 

Chattel slavery was practiced in the Danish West Indies from around 1650 until July 3, 1848, when Colonial Governor Peter von Scholten issued an emancipation proclamation. The Danish government, however, then enacted rules that kept people enslaved by contracts for another two years. In 1847, a year before the governor’s decree, the government instituted a gradual emancipation plan stating that henceforth children born to enslaved laborers would be free. In addition, all forms of slavery would cease entirely in 1859.

Given the confusion and uncertainty around emancipation, sugar plantation owners made sure that the lives of former slaves changed little after emancipation. Many ex-slaves were hired at the plantations where they were previously enslaved and offered one-year working contracts that included a small hut, a plot of land, and a little money. Unlike during slavery, these free workers did not receive food or any care from their employers, prompting some of them to declare that the new conditions were worse that enslavement.

Each October 1 (Contract Day) workers were allowed to leave their plantations and enter into contracts with new plantation owners. On October 1, 1878, workers gathered on the island of St. Croix to protest low wages and harsh living conditions. This gathering turned into a riot. Participants threw stones at Danish soldiers, who soon barricaded themselves in the town fort on the island. The riots were said to be organized and led by three women: Mary Thomas, Axeline Elizabeth Salomon, and Mathilda McBean.

On October 4, 1878, British, French, and American warships arrived at St. Croix help stop the riots but were turned away by local Danish authorities. The next day, Governor von Scholten issued a declaration that all laborers should return to their plantations or be declared “rebels.” The uprising continued, but after two weeks many workers had returned to their plantations and the revolt ended. During the unrest nearly 100 people were killed and 50 houses were burned. Almost 900 acres of sugar were destroyed.

The Danes arrested approximately 400 people. Twelve were sentenced to death and immediately executed. Another thirty-nine were sentenced, but thirty-four had their sentences commuted to shorter terms. Among the last group were Thomas, Salomon, and McBean, who were sent to the women’s prison, Christianshavn, in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1882. They returned to Christiansted, St. Croix in 1887, to serve out the remainder of their sentences. These three women became known as “The Three Queens.”

In 2004, historian Wayne James discovered historical documents that suggested the role of a fourth Queen, Susanna Abramsen, also known as Bottom Belly. St. Croix has a Queen Mary Highway in her honor. The Three Queens Fountain was commissioned by the St. Thomas Historical Trust and unveiled in 2005. Each woman in the statue holds a tool used in the revolt, a flaming torch, a sugarcane knife, and a lantern. In 2018, artist Jeanette Ehlers and La Vaughn Belle created the I Am Queen Marymonument in the port of Copenhagen. The statue is twenty-three feet tall and is Denmark’s first public monument to a black woman.

SOURCE 

Nielsen, E. (2020, September 12. BlackPast)

Martin Sorensen, “Denmark Gets First Public Statue of a Black Woman, a ‘Rebel Queen,” March 31, 2018.

PUBLICATION 

Omotoso Ibukunoluwa 

HISTORY: RUSSIA - UKRAINE RELATIONS

 

Russia and Ukraine have had no formal diplomatic relations since 24 February 2022. The Russian Federation and Ukraine are currently in a state of war: the Russo-Ukrainian War began in 2014 following the Russian annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine across a broad front.

After the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, the successor states' bilateral relations have undergone periods of ties, tensions, and outright hostility. In the early 1990s, Ukraine's policy was dominated by aspirations to ensure its sovereignty and independence, followed by a foreign policy that balanced cooperation with the EU, Russia, and other powerful polities.

Relations between the two countries have been hostile since the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, which toppled Ukraine's elected president Viktor Yanukovych and his supporters, because he refused to sign a political association and free trade agreement with the European Union that enjoyed majority support in Ukraine's parliament. Ukraine's post-revolutionary government wished to commit the country to a future within the EU and NATO, rather than continue to play the delicate diplomatic game of balancing its own economic and security interests with those of Russia, the EU, and NATO members. In 2004 the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Slovakia had joined the EU, followed by Bulgaria and Romania in 2007 (see Member state of the European Union). The Russian government feared that Ukraine's membership of the EU and NATO would complete a western wall of allied countries by restricting Russia's access to the Black Sea. With South Korea and Japan being allied to the US, the Russian government was concerned that Russia was being ring-fenced by potentially hostile powers. In the wake of the Revolution of Dignity, Russia backed separatist militias in the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic in a war in Ukraine's economically important Donbas region, on its eastern border with Russia. This region has a Russian ethnic majority. By early 2022 the Russo-Ukrainian War had killed more than 13,000 people, and brought some Western sanctions on Russia.

In 2019, amendments were made to the Constitution of Ukraine, which enshrined the irreversibility of the country's strategic course towards EU and NATO membership. Throughout 2021 and 2022, Russian military buildup on the border of Ukraine has escalated tensions between the two countries and strained bilateral relations, with the United States sending a strong message that invasion would be met with dire consequences for Russia's economy. On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, which prompted Ukraine to break diplomatic ties with its eastern neighbour.

History of relations

Both Russia and Ukraine claim their heritage from the Rus (also known as Kyivan Rus or Ancient Rus), a polity that united several tribes and clans of different ethnicities under the Byzantine church in the 10th century. According to old Russian chronicles, Kyiv, the capital of modern Ukraine, was proclaimed the mother of Rus (Russian/Ruthenian) cities as it was the capital of the powerful late Medieval state of Rus.

Muscovy and the Russian Empire

After the Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus', the histories of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples diverged. The former, having successfully united all remnants of Rus's northern provinces, evolved into the Russian state. The latter came under the domination of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, followed by the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Within the Commonwealth, the militant Zaporozhian Cossacks refused polonization, and often clashed with the Commonwealth government which was controlled by the Polish nobility.

Unrest among the Cossacks caused them to rebel against the Commonwealth and seek union with Russia, with which they shared much of their culture, language and religion. This was eventually formalized through the Treaty of Pereyaslav in 1654. Starting in the mid-17th century, Ukraine was gradually absorbed into the Russian Empire, which entirely absorbed into Russia by the late 18th century with the partition of Poland. Soon after the Cossack host was forcibly disbanded by the Russian Empire and most Cossacks were relocated to the Kuban region on the southern edge of the Russian Empire.

The Russian Empire considered Ukrainians(and Belarusians) to be ethnically Russian, and referred to them as "Little Russians". Until the end of World War I this view was only opposed by a small group of Ukrainian nationalists. Nevertheless, a perceived threat of "Ukrainian separatism" set in motion a set of measures aimed at the russification of the "Little Russians". In 1804, the Ukrainian language was banned from schools as a subject and language of instruction. In 1876 Alexander II's secretary Ems Ukaz prohibited the publication and importation of most Ukrainian language books, public performances and lectures in the Ukrainian language, and even the printing of Ukrainian texts accompanying musical scores.

Ukrainian People's Republic

The February Revolution saw establishment of official relations between the Russian Provisional Government and the Ukrainian Central Rada (Central Council of Ukraine) that was represented at the Russian government by its commissar Petro Stebnytsky. At the same time Dmitry Odinets was appointed the representative of Russian Affairs in the Ukrainian government. After the Soviet military aggression by the Soviet government at the beginning of 1918, Ukraine declared its full independence from the Russian Republic on 22 January 1918, as the Ukrainian People's Republic which existed from 1917 to 1922. The two treaties of Brest-Litovsk that Ukraine and Russia signed separately with the Central Powers calmed the military conflict between them, and peace negotiations were initiated the same year.

After the end of World War I, Ukraine became a battleground in the Ukrainian War of Independence, linked to the Russian Civil War. Both Russians and Ukrainians fought in nearly all armies based on personal political beliefs.

In 1922, Ukraine and Russia were two of the founding members of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and were the signatories of the treaty that terminated the union in December 1991.

The end of the Russian Empire also ended the ban on the Ukrainian language. This was followed by a period of korenizatsiya that promoted the cultures of the different Soviet Republics.

Holodomor

In 1932–1933 Ukraine experienced the Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор, "Extermination by hunger" or "Hunger-extermination"; derived from 'Морити голодом', "Killing by Starvation") which was a man-made famine in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic that killed up to 7.5 million Ukrainians. During the famine, which is also known as the "Terror-Famine in Ukraine" and "Famine-Genocide in Ukraine", millions of citizens of the Ukrainian SSR, the majority being ethnically Ukrainian, died of starvation in an unprecedented peacetime catastrophe. Scholars disagree on the relative importance of natural factors and bad economic policies as causes of the famine, and the degree to which the destruction of the Ukrainian peasantry was premeditated by Soviet leaders.

The Holodomor famine extended to many Soviet republics, including Russia and Kazakhstan. In the absence of documentary proof of intent, scholars have also argued that the Holodomor was caused by the economic problems associated with the radical changes implemented during the period of liquidation of private property and Soviet industrialization, combined with the widespread drought of the early 1930s. However, on 13 January 2010, Kyiv Appellate Court posthumously found Stalin, Kaganovich, Molotov, and the Ukrainian Soviet leaders Kosior and Chubar, amongst other functionaries, guilty of genocide against Ukrainians during the Holodomor famine.

SOURCE 

1.  Shyrokykh, Karina (June 2018). "The Evolution of the Foreign Policy of Ukraine: External Actors and Domestic Factors". Stockholm University. Archived from the original on 25 February 2022. Retrieved 30 September 2021.
2. ^ Ukraine sticks to positions on Russia but leaves room for "compromises" Archived2020-04-05 at the Wayback Machine, Reuters(12 February 2020)
3. ^ "Russia is stoking tension with Ukraine and the EU". The Economist. 14 November 2021. Archived from the original on 14 December 2021. Retrieved 14 December 2021. Rumours of wars: Russia is stoking tension with Ukraine and the EU: Destabilisation rather than invasion is probably its goal, but that leaves plenty of room for miscalculation
4. ^ Crowley, Michael (10 December 2021). "Biden Delivers a Warning to Putin Over Ukraine". The New York Times.
5. Gumilyov, Lev (2005). Ot Rusi k Rossii От Руси к России [From Rus' to Russia]. AST. Moscow. p. ^{[page needed]}. ISBN 5-17-012201-2
6.  Shambarov, Valery (2007). Kazachestvo: istoriya volnoy Rusi Казачество: история вольной Руси [The Cossacks: History of a Free Rus']. Algorithm Expo. Moscow. p. ^{[page needed]}. ISBN 978-5-699-20121-1.
7. Abdelal, Rawi (2005). National Purpose in the World Economy: Post-Soviet States in Comparative Perspective. Cornell University Press. p. 106. ISBN 978-0-8014-8977-8. Archived from the original on 2021-04-10. Retrieved 2017-09-11
8.  Bassin, Mark; Glebov, Sergey; Laruelle, Marlene, eds. (2015). Between Europe & Asia: The Origins, Theories, and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism. University of Pittsburgh Press. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. p. 135. ISBN 978-0-8229-8091-9. Archived from the original on 2021-04-10. Retrieved 2017-09-11.

PUBLICATION 

Omotoso Ibukunoluwa 

AFRICA HISTORY: FIRST SUDANESE CIVIL WAR (1955-1972)

The First Sudanese Civil War was a twelve-year conflict between the northern and southern regions of Sudan between 1955 and 1972. The war began a year before Sudan was declared independent from Great Britain. The main belligerents in the war were the central government of Sudan and the Southern Sudan Liberation Movement (SSLM). Great Britain, Egypt, and the Soviet Union supported the central government while the SSLM was backed by Ethiopia, Uganda, and Israel. An estimated 500,000 people died during the twelve-year conflict.

The roots of the conflict can be traced to 1953 when the United Kingdom and Egypt agreed that Sudan would become an independent nation in 1956. On August 18, 1955, the Equatoria Corps, which was composed mostly of British Colonial soldiers from southern Sudan, attempted to disperse a crowd of protesters in the town of Torit, Sudan (now Torit, South Sudan). The southern soldiers, however, appeared to be sympathetic to the protesters, prompting the central government in Khartoum (the capital of Sudan) to replace them with troops from the northern region. Outraged, the southern soldiers mutinied, killing 336 northerners, both soldiers and civilians. News of the Torit mutiny spread, and southern soldiers across Sudan revolted.

Other factors influenced the conflict as well. The Northern two-thirds of Sudan were overwhelmingly Muslim while Christianity or indigenous religions were most popular in the south. Culturally, Northern Sudanese people spoke Arabic and identified with Saudi Arabia and North Africa while the Southerners looked to Ethiopia and the newly-independent states of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Since Southern Sudanese forces lacked the infrastructure to launch a major offensive against the north, they launched a guerrilla war. They were also the first insurgency to recruit child soldiers. As the fighting progressed, Southern Sudanese rebels divided into two factions. One group, the Sudan African National Union (SANU), was formed and led by William Deng from the Dinka ethnic group. Another faction, the Anya Nya, was founded and led by Joseph Lagu and was composed mostly of the Madi group.

The war created problems for the government in Khartoum as well. Because Northern forces were unable to put down the rebellion, several coups brought about new governments. In 1965, ten years after the civil war began, interim prime minister Muhammad Ahmad Mahgoub offered amnesty to the Southern Sudanese rebels if they would lay down their arms. The offer was rejected by the rebels, and the fighting continued.

By 1970 the civil war had taken about 500,000 lives, mostly in the South. In 1969, General Gaafar Nimeri took control of the Sudanese government and instituted a socialist program which included nationalizing banks and other businesses. He received crucial military support from the Soviet Union. Two years later, after attempted assassination by Sudanese communists, Nimeri, on July 19, 1971, renounced socialism and invited foreign investors into Sudan. Eight months later on March 27, 1972, the government in Khartoum and the Southern rebels signed the Addis Ababa Agreement which ended the First Sudanese Civil War. The country of Sudan remained in a tense peace for eleven years until a much larger and bloodier conflict called the Second Sudanese Civil War began in 1983.

SOURCE: 

Momodu, S. (2020, January 22.BlackPast)

PUBLICATION: 

Omotoso Ibukunoluwa 

ATLANTIC TRADE WAR: TACKY’S WAR (1760-1761)

Tacky’s War, also known as Tacky’s Rebellion, was an uprising among Jamaica Akan enslaved people from Ghana that occurred in St. Mary Parish, Jamaica, against the British from 1760 to 1761. Other ethnic groups from Ghana including the Akyem, Nzema, Fanti, and Ashanti took part in the rebellion. The rebellion was led by Tacky (also known as Takyi), who was from the Fante ethnic group. This war was one of the most significant slave rebellions in the Caribbean during the 18th century before the Haitian Revolution, which began three decades later.

The goal of the rebellion was to take control of the British island colony and create a separate Black independent nation. The rebels were inspired by the First Maroon War that also occurred in Jamaica, from 1728 to 1740. That rebellion was led by Queen Nanny of the Maroons. They did not know that the success of the Maroons in that earlier conflict would eventually help bring about the downfall of their rebellion.

Tacky’s War began on Easter Monday, April 7, 1760. Tacky and his followers began the rebellion by killing white masters and overseers on the Frontier and Trinity plantations. The owner of the Trinity plantation, Zachary Bayly, however, managed to escape. Slaves also rose up on the Esher estate owned by wealthy politician William Beckford and joined in the rebellion. The rebels, now in the hundreds, made their way to the storeroom at Fort Haldane where they killed the storekeeper and captured and defended the town of Port Maria from British colonial forces. Tacky and his troops commandeered nearly four barrels of gunpowder and 40 firearms and then overran the Heywood Hall plantation.

By this point more than 400 people had joined Tacky and his followers. While at Ballards Valley, as Tacky and his followers were celebrating their success, one enslaved person slipped away and sounded the alarm. In response, on April 9, 1760 Lt. Gov. Sir Henry Moore dispatched the 74th regiment, comprising 80 mounted militia from Spanish Town, the colonial capital, to the rebellion in St. Mary Parish. Ironically the militia were joined by Maroons (free Black people) from Moore Town, Charles Town, and Scott’s Hall, Jamaica.

On April 12, 1760, British troops and their Maroon allies attacked the rebels, wounding Tacky in battle. Two days later additional Maroons under British commanders engaged Tacky and his followers in the Battle of Rocky Valley. Most of the rebels were killed. Many others fled into a cave near what is now called Tacky Falls, where they committed mass suicide. Tacky and a few of his followers fled into the woods pursued by Maroons. One British marksman, attacking with the Maroons, shot and killed Tacky and then severed his head. That head was then displayed on a pole in Spanish Town until some of Tacky’s surviving followers took it down. Many of the remaining surviving rebels were captured and executed. Resistance, however, continued for nearly a year until 1761, when British colonial forces and their Maroon allies killed or captured the remaining followers.

Despite Tacky’s death and the failure of the rebellion, servile insurrections would continue in Jamaica until slavery was officially ended by the British government in 1834. The costs of these continuing rebellions was a major factor in the British government outlawing slavery throughout the Empire.

SOURCE:

Momodu, S. (2021, December 03, BlackPast).

Vincent Brown (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2020; “The Tacky War,” The Jamaicans

 

PUBLICATION: Omotoso Ibukunoluwa